Top speaking topics
1. Leveraging Tech to Build the Future of Belonging
Program summary: This session will discuss how applying futures thinking to tech can illuminate how founders can examine how to re-design products and and remodel approaches tech-enabled services to fulfill the basic human need for belonging over the next decade as loneliness, disconnection, and exclusion become more pervasive.
2. Paradigm Shifts Driving the Future of Belonging
Program summary: Belonging is a multi-faceted human need, inclusive of how we choose to identify ourselves to self and others, emotional and sociocultural attachment to others, shared group affinities and locations, and the interconnected systems within which we are situated. This talk will provide an overview of major paradigm shifts within each arena that are shaping the literacies and approaches to belonging over the next decade.
3. Belonging in the Age of Omni Crisis: Pathways for Transformation
Program summary: The COVID19 pandemic shows what it means to live in an omni-crisis: a world where cataclysmic catastrophe can occur anywhere at any time, perpetuating and exacerbating simultaneous cascades of disaster and disruption. Against a backdrop of ever increasing volatility and disruption, we have the opportunity to reimagine our systems and narratives to better address our human needs. Belonging is a multi-faceted human need, inclusive of how we choose to identify ourselves to self and others, emotional and sociocultural attachment to others, shared group affinities and locations, and the interconnected systems within which we are situated.
Many of our narratives and systems reinforce a past and current reality of command and control hierarchies, extraction and exploitation of human potential and natural resources, and systemic oppression and exclusion that undermine belonging. But signals of change challenge these official futures, demonstrating the possibilities of new models, practices and concepts to inform and shape our future. This talk will explore how organizations can re-design services and remodel approaches in their work to fulfill the basic human need for belonging and become more resilient over the next decade as loneliness, disconnection, and exclusion become more pervasive.
